The weekend after Hurricane Hugo hit the South Carolina coast, James Lamb, coin director of Christie's, the New York auction house, made a secretive trip to a Southern port city. Lamb won't name the city but will say that he went there to see what has become the talk of the coin community: the horde of gold coins and bullion pulled from the wreck of the SS Central America before the hurricane struck. "It was very, very exciting," Lamb said. "I spent (a day) down there.

As seagoing epics go, it never will rival the Titanic's tragic end. But the Harvard helped chart a colorful era in California's social history before it came to its own unhappy demise in the fog off Santa Barbara's treacherous coast. Both the Harvard and its sister ship, the Yale, were launched in 1906 from East Coast shipyards. By 1910, they were plying the increasingly busy passenger and freight lanes linking San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Phoenician mariners sailed more than 2,500 years ago into the uncertain waters of the Mediterranean, praying to their storm god for a successful voyage--only to meet death in a fierce tempest. Now, American explorer Robert Ballard has located their two ships--the world's oldest known deep-water sea wrecks--using the same techniques he used to find the Titanic.

A tanker sunk by a Japanese submarine 55 years ago has been located, and most of its cargo of 4.1 million gallons of crude oil appears to be intact, the government reported Friday. The 440-foot tanker Montebello was sunk Dec. 23, 1941, just 16 days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was en route from Port San Luis near Pismo Beach, where it had been loaded with 75,346 barrels of crude, to Vancouver, British Columbia.

Marine researchers on a salvage mission off Santa Cruz Island believe they have inadvertently located the sunken wreck of the Vil Vana, a commercial shrimp trawler that mysteriously disappeared with all seven men aboard nearly two years ago. The discovery was made last Wednesday when UC Santa Barbara researchers were trying to retrieve a computerized sediment-collecting instrument belonging to the university's Marine Science Institute.

A shipwreck off the North Carolina coast believed to be that of famous pirate Blackbeard could be fully excavated in three years. "That's really our target," said Steve Claggett, the state archeologist, while discussing 10 years of research conducted since the shipwreck was found just off Atlantic Beach. The ship ran aground in 1718, and some researchers believe it was a French slave ship Blackbeard captured in 1717 and renamed Queen Anne's Revenge.